... A nod's as good as a wink when you're on the radio By MOIRA PETTY THERE is refinement of face and bearing about Bill Nighy which, in a visual medium, might not have found him cast as a coarse Irish small-time villain with a compulsion about his bodily functions. As Sean Bourke, the criminal who unexpectedly found fame when he sprung George Blake from prison, he was magnificently pitted against ...

... Putting the PC in police constable By MOIRA PETTY WHEN drama becomes subverted to a cause or an issue it's easy to end up seeing everything as black or white. In the play about the police and racism, Saturday Night Theatre- The Right Result (R4; Sat July 17) a white commuter was being questioned after a black youth was killed, apparently in the course of a mugging. Coffee black or white? he ...

... CECIL Madden. Assistant to the Controller of Television Programmes, will once again be in charge of the BBC's Television Celebrity Dais at this year's Radio Show from August 27 to September 6. I.ast year, in response to his invitations, over 250 celebrities of TV, stage, lilnts and radio appeared in person to meet the public. This year invitations to appear on the Celebrity Dais will be ...

... Happy with Beckett BY MOIRA PETTY The pareckiown sense of reality that is the essence of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (Catherine Bailey Ltd for R3, Sunday, March 31) was wonderfully captured by Geraldine McEwan. She was Winnie, who begins the play up to her waist in sand and ends it nearly submerged, but whose commentary, a near-monologue, continues unabated. McEwan's thin, hard but ...

... Losing the way with characters a few tabs short of a full trip BY MOIRA PETTY At times it sounded as if Timothy Leary had had a hand in the writing of Phyllis Nagy's play The Strip (BBC Radio North for R4, Monday, March 27). But most of the characters were a few tabs short of a full trip, especially the Ku Klux Klan terrorist Lester (Christopher Fairbanks) who had hardly evolved from the ...

... Shorn's satirical edge was a cut above BY MOIRA PETTY Psychobabble rabble, the slavering rent-a-quote hardliners and the less than acute media analysis which so often accompanies the practice of crime and punishment, was the subject of an inventive satirical drama by Tony Duarte for the commercial work. Shorn (Independent Radio Drama Productions for London Newstalk, Saturday. June 24), set ...

... Domestic drama well judged BY MOIRA PETTY Few playwrights have caught the stultifying nature of family relationships better than Tennessee Williams. Gordon House's supremely well-judged production of The Glass Menagerie (BBC World Service in conjunction with LA Theatre Works, from Saturday, Apnl 19) and boast ing the Broadway cast perfectly evoked what Williams called the slow and ...

... Cry of Last Orders cannot dampen spirits BY MOIRA PETTY If television or the cinema had decided to turn the latest Booker Prize&winning novel into a film, they would still be arguing about budgets, casting and script refinements. Radio, meanwhile, is up and running with Graham Swift's Last Orders (R4. Monday. February 10), even recording part of what has been described as a modem Canterbury ...

... When the drama is all in the voice By Moira Petty Fat, pretty, sinister, sexy-- such visual considerations mean nothing when the actor is cast in a radio play. Here the voice itself must bring us the corpulence, the boniness, the plainness, as a component of the character. But are radio drama directors really free to cast against type, and if they do, what battles will rage within the brain ...

... Hot Property's stolen moments BY MOIRA PETTY The exquisite afternoon play, The Property of Colette Nervi (BBC Belfast for R4, Thursday, April 15) began as a short story and kept its microcosmic view of life which lit up the world around it. Master wordsmith William Trevor dramatised his story of a moral sequence of events in rural Ireland in the sixties. Deftly directed by Roland Jaquarello, ...

... Wrestling with Demons Harry Younger Hall The location of this play is at first obscure. Slowly we glean that it is a dormitory in a kind of quasi-reli gious hostel for young men who are trying to deny their homosexuality a kind of AA for gays. With confes sional workshops in a dormitory pul sating with sexual tension, it seems not the best environment for kicking the homosexual habit. Jez, one ...

... A letter in the correspondence column of a magazine last year, describing a mysterious death-warning which had occurred for centuries in an Irish family, gave Maurice Vernon the idea for a new radio play which listeners will hear in Saturday Matinee in the Home Service on August 16. The warn ing, wrote the correspondent, who was a member of the family, had recurred quite recently and con ...